A JetBlue airplane takes off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. / Seth Wenig, AP

by Thomas Frank, USA TODAY

by Thomas Frank, USA TODAY

After decades of suffering through countless delayed flights, airline passengers are facing a new twist: Record numbers of airplanes are arriving early.

But that's not as good as it sounds.

One in five domestic flights on major airlines got to the arrival gate 15 minutes or more ahead of schedule in 2012, a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. Department of Transportation records shows. That's the highest early-arrival rate since the DOT began tracking arrival times in 1987, according to the analysis of tens of millions of DOT flight records.

Last year, for the first time, more flights arrived early than were late, canceled or diverted to an unplanned destination, the analysis shows.

Early flights: 1,213,842.

Problem flights: 1,106,539.

"It's completely unexpected," Stefan Gluck of Miami said of the six flights he took this year, all early arrivals. "Last year, it seemed every flight was delayed."

The trend has helped airlines boast of improved performance to a flying public irked by rising airfares and crowded airplanes. "It's hard to see why this is not great news," said John Heimlich, chief economist at Airlines for America, the trade group for major U.S. airlines.

Early arrivals certainly gratify passengers such as Gluck, who had time to meet friends for dinner after his recent flight from Phoenix to Miami got in a half-hour ahead of schedule.

But their ubiquity points to problems. Early arrivals partly result from increased efficiency, but also from airlines adapting to an inefficient system by padding flight schedules and cramming more people on airplanes.

The average scheduled flight time was longer last year on 93% of domestic routes than it was in 1995. And flights were more crowded than ever in 2012.

Scheduled flight times measure how a trip from departure gate to arrival gate - not just how long a plane is in the air. The steady expansion of the times means that an "early" flight often takes longer than it once took.

The average flight from Boston's Logan airport to New York's LaGuardia took one hour in 1995. In 2012, it took 75 minutes.

Yet the Logan-to-LaGuardia early-arrival rate soared to 38% last year from just 2% in 1995 as Delta and US Airways added nearly 20 minutes to the schedule.

With the early arrival rate now exceeding 30% on more than 700 routes, and reaching as high as 65% on a few routes, some question whether airlines have padded schedules too much and are starting to cost themselves money and aggravate at least some passengers.

Early arrivals can increase airline costs when they lead to airplanes sitting idle at airports and a flight crew being paid for more time than a flight actually takes.

Flights from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles International - one of the busiest U.S. routes - are now scheduled to take 27 minutes longer on average than in 1988. Yet last year, nearly half of the 11,700 JFK-to-LAX flights arrived early, one of the highest rates.

That added up to 2,700 hours that planes sat idle when they potentially could have been flying.

"Early gate arrival just means that aircraft and crew are being utilized potentially less than they could be, and that means higher costs," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology aeronautics professor Peter Belobaba. A 2010 study sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that "schedule buffers" cost airlines $3.7 billion in 2007 - nearly as much as the cost of actual delays to airlines, the study found.

The cost has likely increased since 2007, as major airlines added time to flight schedules on 60% of domestic routes, USA TODAY found. Schedules have been padded even as the number of commercial flights has fallen by about 10% and the early-arrival rate grew from 12% to 20%.

William McCurry, a business consultant from Princeton, N.J., gets annoyed when so much extra time has been added to a schedule that he has to take a later connecting flight than he might if schedules were tighter.

"Where the downside comes is if you're trying to make a connection. You're saying, if they were honest with the arrival time, I could make this earlier connection. But because they've got the fluff time, I have to wait two or three hours for a later connection," McCurry said.

As airlines have expanded flight schedules, Barry Maher, a speaker and trainer from Corona, Calif., has seen them shrink connection times from nearly an hour to as little as 30 minutes, in effect assuming that planes will arrive early and give transferring passengers more time than a schedule indicates. But when flights arrive on time at large airports, Maher has had to dash through terminals and, on a recent transfer at Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport, had to wave down a transport cart to make his connecting flight "as the door was closing."

"Often you find yourself with these ridiculously short connections," Maher said.

Idle time drives some fliers batty

Some schedule padding has been necessary to accommodate the growing amount of time airplanes spend on tarmacs, runways and in the air, where bad weather often creates congestion. The average flight spent 13% more time last year than in 1995 waiting to take off and to park at a gate on arrival - a source of endless annoyance to many passengers.

"Sometimes we wait longer (on the arriving tarmac) than the extra time we had to spare, because the aircraft occupying our gate is late closing out," said Marcelo Almeida of Coppell, Texas. "I find myself nowadays hoping we don't land more than 10 minutes early, because I know we'll sit on the ground before we can proceed to the gate."

And some padding reflects industry caution, especially in recent years as the DOT, responding to passenger frustration over extreme delays, has stepped up its authority to fine airlines for delays.

Airlines regularly scrutinize flight schedules for possible tweaks such as shifting a departure time by a few minutes. They're slower to change the amount of time allotted for a flight, and may need months or years to understand why a flight consistently arrives early or late. It could be a flawed schedule. It could be aberrant weather.

"We don't want to overreact one way or the other very quickly," said Steve Hozdulick, Southwest Airlines' senior director of operational performance. Southwest added time to many flight schedules in the fall of 2011 anticipating bad weather but then "saw one of the best winters we've had on record in 2011-12."

Weather has been worse this winter, and Southwest is not planning major schedule changes, he said.

Airlines are especially reluctant to tighten schedules on new routes, which they are increasingly flying as they move away from short routes that are best served by smaller planes to longer routes that draw more passengers and are more profitable.

Alaska Airlines began a daily flight from Seattle to Kansas City in mid-March. By late August, the flight had arrived at least 15 minutes early 57% of the time. Yet on Aug. 26, the airline added five minutes to the 31/2-hour flight time. Since then, the flight has been early 77% of the time.

Dan Audette, Alaska's manager of operations research and analysis, is in no rush to tighten the schedule because the route is so new to the airline. "It takes 18 months to start to be confident about trends," Audette said. To fully understand weather on a route requires three years, he said.

Audette also said that as Alaska and other airlines are using individual airplanes on more flights per day, they need to build a greater margin of error into schedules. "We don't know if a third flight on a plane (in one day) is going to be good or bad. So if something down the line does happen, we're able to have that cushion to help recover," he said.

Congress, the DOT and passenger advocates have pressed airlines to reduce flight delays and stop chronically late flights. A policy that took effect in 2010 allows the DOT to penalize airlines for false advertising if a flight is at least 30 minutes late on half of its arrivals in a four-month span.

No airline has been fined under that policy. But they have gotten the message.

"The DOT is very sensitive to delays and dissatisfied passengers," said Sean Cassidy, a vice president of the Air Line Pilots Association labor union and an Alaska Airlines pilot. "Airlines are taking a little more conservative approach to ensure they're going to arrive on time."

The DOT policy also requires airlines to post on-time records of flights on their websites for travelers to see when making a reservation. "Customers benefit from better information and peace of mind," DOT spokesman Bill Mosley said.

Airlines pay close attention to their on-time performance, too. "It's part of their marketing campaigns, part of their affinity programs to develop consumer loyalty," Cassidy said.

Regional jets play a role

With their fleets of 50-seat regional jets, small airlines are handling a growing number of short flights while major airlines move to longer routes that can be served with fewer flights and are a better fit for their larger airplanes.

Longer flights are far more likely to arrive early because pilots have extra time to make up for departure delays or to accelerate ahead of schedule. Flights longer than 1,500 miles were nearly twice as likely to arrive early as flights shorter than 400 miles, USA TODAY found.

The average distance of major airlines' domestic flights soared from 603 miles in 1988 to 772 miles in 2012, DOT records show.

That trend helps explain why Southwest Airlines has seen its early-arrival rate skyrocket from just 1% in 1995 to more than 13% last year. "Southwest has started flying longer flights over the years," Hozdulick said. "In the early '80s, we were almost a regional carrier."

Small airlines are excluded from the DOT reporting requirements, and USA TODAY's analysis excludes flights run by those airlines. Small-airline flights are less likely to arrive early, given their short-haul routes.

One segment profiting from the increase in early arrivals is airports, where passengers appear to be spending more time - and money.

Passengers spent roughly 20% more last year on airport food and retail goods than in 2010, according to a recent report by the Airports Council International-North America.

"I call that the all-good situation," council Executive Vice President Debby McElroy said of early arrivals. "The passenger gets off the airplane early, they have more time to check e-mail, get a sandwich, buy a card."

When software consultant Tink Wilkinson is heading home to Mobile, Ala., from a business trip, his first flight regularly arrives early at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson, leaving him two hours before his connection. That gives Wilkinson time for a sit-down dinner. "If I land in concourse A and am taking off from D, I might go to B to eat," he said.

But Cassidy, the union vice president, worries that early arrivals will turn into delays as the economy recovers, air travel increases, and the aviation industry awaits air-traffic-control improvements that enable more planes to land in a shorter time span. Although on-time performance is near a record high, delays are getting longer. The average delayed flight arrived 56 minutes late last year, up from 38 minutes in the early 1990s. Early flights arrived an average of 22 minutes ahead of schedule.

"My concern is looking further down the line," Cassidy said. "Airlines are flying at record load factors. There's not a lot of slack. Once we start adding more demand and adding passengers and cargo, how is the system going to perform two, three, five or 10 years down the road?"